iPhone 6S Rebuild
2020 - 2021
This started as a simple project to revive a dead iPhone I bought for next to nothing. In mid-2020, I received this phone in a parts-lot along with an iPod Touch 2G. This phone was cosmetically perfect, but showed absolutely no signs of life and would not seem to charge. Even after leaving it on the charger over night, it did not respond to any input and didn't show up when connected to a computer.
The first thing I suspected to be wrong with the phone was either the battery or the charging port assembly. My first instinct was a battery fault, but the charging port flex-cable was dirt cheap online so I ordered that first. Even after installing the new charging port, the phone didn't wake up. I began looking around for battery replacements for the iPhone 6S, but soon noticed that at the time, it was not much more expensive to pick up a second 6S as a donor device.
At this point, it had been several months since I last worked on this project and I had lost a few of the screws from the original phone. Therefore, I decided to just order an iCloud-locked 6S on eBay as they are very cheap and would include most-if-not-all of the parts I needed.
So, I placed an order for an iCloud-Locked Space Gray iPhone 6S that had everything but the screen assembly. I figured that since the original phone's screen was flawless that I wouldn't need to replace it. Once the donor phone arrived, rather than replacing the original battery, I swapped the logic board from the original phone's housing into the donor housing. This was because at this point I realized the original phone had some other missing parts that the donor housing already included. Unfortunately, after reconnecting the screen, the phone didn't boot up. Unsure what the problem was, I connected the iCloud-locked donor's logic board to the screen and battery of the original phone, and to my surprise it booted into iOS. At this point, I now knew that the only screen I had was good, and that it was the logic board that needed replacing.
I started scrolling eBay, looking for a working, unlocked iPhone 6S logic board. To my surprise, even parts for a 6-year old phone can be outrageously expensive. There were very few reasonably-priced logic boards that were confirmed to be working and free of any iCloud lock. On a whim I looked into broken-but-working phones. It was then that I found what I needed: a shattered, dented, scratched-up Rose Gold 64GB iPhone 6S that, according to the seller, worked just fine. It was priced a little higher than what I wanted to invest in this dumb little project that had now been going on here-and-there the better part of a year, but I pulled the trigger in hope that I could finally get at least a somewhat-functional backup phone out of all this.
When the Rose Gold phone arrived, I eagerly plugged it in to make sure it worked as expected before I invested more time and effort into a broken phone. To my disappointment, it didn't turn on or begin charging. I had no choice but to tear it apart and test its logic board separately. I began to tear it down and transplanted its board into the donor housing from the locked phone, careful not to lose any of the tiny screws this time. I plugged the display from the original phone in and... It worked! Now comes the hardest part: Putting everything back together in the right order. I got the new logic board secured into the housing and got to work swapping the white-and-gold home button from the shattered Rose Gold phone into the black display of the original Space Gray phone. Though the original black home button worked, using it with a different logic board would disable Touch ID functionality. So, even though it looked a bit unusual, everything would work as intended.
The end result is a pretty unique iPhone, a Space Gray device with Rose Gold SIM tray and bottom screws, and a white-and-gold home button. This device serves as a backup phone and second 2FA client, so in the event that I was to lose my primary phone, I could still log into any of my Two-Factor-Authentication enabled online accounts.